3 Comments

We support increasing the use of organisation identifiers. However, there may be several issues to consider with this proposal:

The second bullet-point - it appears this will not be possible, in many cases, until there is a solid and stable methodology for public bodies' organisation identifiers.

The third bullet-point - this may be problematic when one organisation is aggregating and publishing data on behalf of multiple agencies. E.g., USAID and MCC's projects are published by the Foreign Assistance Dashboard (a joint USAID and State Dept body). Should all MCC projects be prefixed by the organisation identifier for this body (USAID/State/a combination)? It seems like it would be preferable for MCC and USAID to use their own identifiers.

The fourth bullet-point - this seems to make sense. However, it would be useful to provide some analysis on the extent to which this is not currently the case, and complications that could be introduced by enforcing it (see example above).

second bullet-point - this is written to apply post acceptance of 2.01 organisation identifier proposal

third & fourth - this is essential validation to protect against identity theft. When creating a registry account a publisher MUST specify the reporting-org/@ref it will use in all its activities. No two publishers can have the same reporting-org/@ref. And no other publisher should be able to publish an activity containing another publisher's identity. It is not unusual for a publisher to report on behalf a number of agencies (eg Swedish Sida). This does not affect the way in which the participating organisations are reported. Given that the same activity can be reported by any number of organisations it is the link between activity and publisher that makes the report globally unique.

I expect if the identified must be recorded in IATI Registry, then it may be up to IATI Registry to define the rule of the identifier syntax, unless it actually follows IATI schema rules. Pattern validation can be included into schema definition to enforce the identifier allowed format.